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It may look like high-speed frottage in nice frocks, but dirty dancing is rather more innocent than it looks.

"I think we'd probably call it sensual dancing nowadays," said Josef Brown, one of the stars of Dirty Dancing, a stage musical based on the hit 1987 movie that will receive its world premiere in Sydney in November.

Producers Jacobsen Entertainment and Miami-based promoter Jack Utsick are confident the show will be a hit with the generation that still swoons at the memory of Swayze's dancing and knows all the words to the film's Oscar-winning song Time of My Life.

Jacobsen and Utsick hope to transfer it to New York, London and beyond after an Australian run that begins at Sydney's Theatre Royal on November 18.

Set in 1963, Dirty Dancing is a coming-of-age story about an innocent middle-class teenager called Frances "Baby" Houseman (played by Jennifer Grey in the film). Holidaying at a resort with her parents, she discovers a forbidden underworld where Johnny Castle and his friends practise a risque form of dance.

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The film was written by New York screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein, who always intended to turn it into a "stage play with music". She's delighted the show is opening in Australia.

"I'd always wanted the seminal production to be in English and far away from New York and London," she said in Sydney yesterday. "I wanted to develop it in privacy."

Not that we're being used as testing ground for bigger markets, she insists. Bergstein, who has written extra scenes for the stage production, is lavish in her praise of the local cast lead by Brown and former Neighbours star Kym Valentine as "Baby".

Asked why the film still has such resonance, Bergstein said it was inspirational, but realistic, too.

"It makes you believe if your heart is high enough you can do things you never dreamed of," she said. "But everyone [in it] earns the luck they have: they pay for it morally or artistically."